Summer term 2016 Teaching

Literature Department
Summer term 2016
BA - Programm
32200 Seminar
Introduction to Literary Studies II (Florian Sedlmeier)
Zeit: Do 10:00-12:00 (Erster Termin: 21.04.2016)
Ort: 203 Seminarraum (Lansstr. 7 / 9)
The seminar complements the class “Introduction to Literary Studies,” further
familiarizing students with conventions of genre and methods of
interpretation. Reading texts from various centuries, we will explore
influential formats of criticism such as the editorial, the essay, and the
manifesto; and we will look at such forms and genres as captivity narratives,
comics, jeremiads, and travel sketches—literary modes of cultural expression
that are of particular relevance to American literary history and American
culture at large.
For an active participation credit you will be asked to give a presentation and
to write three short reviews; for a full graded “Schein” you will have to write
three short papers on top of these basic requirements.
Vertiefungsmodul B Literatur – Literarische Gattungen
32201 Vertiefungsseminar
“Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem”: African-American Literature in the PostReconstruction Period (Sabine Engwer)
Zeit: Fr 12:00-14:00 (Erster Termin: 22.04.2016)
Ort: 203 Seminarraum (Lansstr. 7 / 9)
The Post-Reconstruction period, famously termed the “Nadir of Race
Relations” by the African-American historian Rayford Logan, spans the era
from the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s to the early years of the
twentieth century. This period was characterized by a severe backlash against
the newly-freed African-American population through the institutionalized
racism of the “Jim Crow” laws and a significant rise in lynchings in the South
of the United States. For writers of color at the time, this climate of
repression led to a decidedly political agenda for their literary work. The
battle for equality, political enfranchisement and against the ubiquitous
32202 Vertiefungsseminar
Furiously Funny: Contemporary Racial Satire (Johannes Kohrs)
Zeit: Mo 14:00-16:00 (Erster Termin: 18.04.2016)
Ort: 203 Seminarraum (Lansstr. 7 / 9)
32203 Vertiefungsseminar
Writing the Early Republic: Death, Seduction, Wandering (Mary Ann SnyderKörber)
Zeit: Do 08:30-10:00 (Erster Termin: 21.04.2016)
Ort: 203 Seminarraum (Lansstr. 7 / 9)
racism they experienced, informed their writing significantly. It is the aim of
this BA seminar to familiarize students with the literary responses of AfricanAmerican authors to the pervasive racism and repression they experienced in
their everyday lives. We will critically examine a number of texts from the era,
contextualize them historically and unearth the various narrative strategies
employed by their authors in their quest to achieve political impact and
influence within the African-American community and beyond.
In this seminar we will investigate the role of satire and humor in complicating
our understanding of identity and difference in the cultural paradigm of the
post-Civil Rights era. Through a comparative framework consisting of readings
of novels, poems, essays and plays by the authors Frank Chin, Percival Everett
and Sherman Alexie we will engage with literary provocations that exemplify
furiously funny attacks on 'race' and its realities, specifically the so-called
Chinese, African and Native American "experience". Resonating with an era of
both unprecedented social progress and inequity these works are variations
of the ambivalent attempt to negotiate between sardonic response and moral
responsibility. Everett's own assessment of this challenge will serve as an
overarching guideline for our inquiry: "Humor is hard to do, but it allows you
certain strategic advantages. If you can get someone laughing, then you can
make them feel like sh*t a lot more easily." In order for us to properly enjoy
this satiric confrontation please make sure to purchase a copy of Percival
Everett's novels "erasure" (2001) and "I Am Not Sidney Poitier" (2009).
Additional reading material will be provided via blackboard and the
Handapparat.
"These are the times that try men's souls," wrote the firebrand Thomas Paine
in 1776. His more specific reference is to the armed struggle for American
independence from Britain. However, Paine's diagnosis of anxiety, trial, and
soul-renting struggle in regards to the United States applies long after that
political independence was won.
This course explores the promises, but even more intently the perils of USAmerican nation building from the late 18th to the early 19th century. Class
meetings alternate between contextualizing sessions in which we explore key
issues of the period and case-study sessions in which we focus on specific
texts and genres. Our itinerary begins with sentimental narratives of sex and
death: the Lucinda episode in Joel Barlow's The Columbiad (1807), Susanna
Rowson's Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth (1791) and/or Hannah Foster's
The Coquette (1797). We then continue with "wandering" tales that map the
nation through travel and letter writing such as J. Hector St. John de
Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782) along with satiric
variations. Fears regarding captivity will consequently concern us as we
consider Native American "haunting" of the new nation in Charles Brocken
Brown's Edgar Huntly (1799) together with the paranoia regarding foreign
contaminations detectible in texts like The Algerine Captive (1797) by Royall
Tyler. Our investigation will conclude with the fictions of espionage penned by
Peter Markow in The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania (1787) and James Fenimore
Cooper in The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821).
32204 Vertiefungsseminar
Writing, Picturing, Performing the Great Depression (Birte Wege)
Zeit: Mo 10:00-12:00 (Erster Termin: 18.04.2016)
Ort: 203 Seminarraum (Lansstr. 7 / 9)
Recommendations:
As eighteenth-century novels are not just full of tears, rage, deception, and
seduction, but are also often rather long, I strongly recommend acquainting
yourself with at least a few of the case-study texts before the semester
begins: either by purchasing a newer edition or dipping into online collections
like HathiTrust Digital Library or archive.org that offer access to a range of
historical editions
‘The Great Depression’ evokes a number of distinct images. After the glitter
and hedonism of the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, came the grit of the Dust
Bowl, poverty, migrant workers, the specter of rising Fascism in Europe,
political unrest at home – but also the glamour of classic Hollywood and the
hope of the New Deal.
This seminar will explore the breadth of themes and images associated with
the Great Depression, and the variety of media which seek to capture this
complex and vibrant era. We will examine a range of narrative forms, both
from the 1930s and later (re)imaginings of the Great Depression, combining
discussion of content with theoretical work on subjects ranging from social
realism to photography and graphic narrative. Readings will include classics
like John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath and James Agee and Walker
Evan’s photo-essay Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, as well as more recent
novels, works of the Federal Theatre Project, movies, TV series, comics and
wordless woodcut novels.
Wissenschaftliches Arbeiten - Kolloquium
32105 Colloquium
BA-Colloquium Kultur/Literatur (Alexander Starre)
Zeit: Mi 12:00-14:00 (Erster Termin: 20.04.2016)
Ort: 201 Seminarraum (Lansstr. 7 / 9)
Master Programme
Literature (A) – Literatury History
32210 Hauptseminar
20th-Century American Drama (Birte Wege)
Zeit: Di 12:00-14:00 (Erster Termin: 19.04.2016)
Ort: 201 Seminarraum (Lansstr. 7 / 9)
Evan as playwrights like Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller
are considered an integral part of the American literary canon, American
drama itself remains, as one study names it, the ‘Bastard Art.’ Equally
neglected, supposedly, by audiences and literary studies, it battles the stigma
of being, with a few exceptions, unoriginal, middlebrow, and generally
inferior to both its European cousins and more highly-regarded genres in
American literature.
The vibrant theatre scene extending well beyond Broadway, and the wealth
of material produced throughout the twentieth century, negate this
misrepresentation. This seminar will explore the broad spectrum of American
drama. We will combine theoretical readings from literary and performance
studies with a range of primary texts, juxtaposing canonical pieces with lesserknown, yet equally significant experimental works. The seminar will explore
the possibilities of the dramatic form as well as historical contexts, and how
American theatre engaged and continues to engage with the dominant
political issues of the day.
Literature (B) – Literary Theory
32211 Seminar
New Media Writing: Copying, Appropriating, and Materialization in the 21st
Century (Mary Ann Snyder-Körber)
Zeit: Do 10:00-12:00 (Erster Termin: 21.04.2016)
Ort: 201 Seminarraum (Lansstr. 7 / 9)
Does the digital make a difference? The poet Kenneth Goldsmith has
answered this question with a resounding "yes." "With the rise of the Web,
writing has met its photography," he argues. We have "a situation similar to
that of painting upon the invention of photography, a technology so much
better at doing what the art form was trying to do that, to survive, the field
had to alter its course radically." Today, "faced with an unprecedented
amount of available digital text, writing needs to redefine itself to adapt to
the new environment of textual abundance" ("Why Conceptual Writing? Why
Now?" 2011).
This seminar is dedicated to testing, as well as questioning, the proposition
that digital culture is reconfiguring how we create and experience writing. To
these ends, we will revisit the model of hypertext to be found in projects like
Adrienne Eisen's Six Sex Scenes (1996) in addition to print work such as
Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), Marissa Pessl's Night Film
(2013), and Barbara Browning's I'm Trying to Reach You (2011). We will
further consider texts composed in the new media formats of twitter and the
online collaborative communities of fan fiction. Such selections include
Jennifer Egan's "Black Box" (2012), Teju Cole's "Hafiz" (2014), and David
Mitchell's "The Right Sort" (2012) together with Slade House (2015). A further
area of focus will be projects of "anti-virtuality" represented by Miranda July's
Somebody (2014-2015) as well as It Chooses You (2011) and Goldsmith's own
call to Printing Out the Internet (2013) and documentation of Capital: New
York, Capital of the Twentieth Century (2015).
The course concludes with a workshop conference on Friday, July 15th
bringing together course participants and scholars from outside the JFKI for a
day of discussion. Guest speakers will be Andrew S. Gross (Georg-AugustUniversität Göttingen) and Bettina Soller (Leibniz Universität Hannover).
Recommendations:
Due to the nature of the course, many materials are available online.
However, please acquire access to the longer print projects of Egan, Pessl,
Browning, and Mitchell. Also, as Goldsmith's assertions are a kick-off point
and target for questioning in the seminar, browsing through some of his posts
on issues of "uncreative" writing in the digital age is a good warm-up. See, for
example, "If It Doesn't Exist on the Internet, It Doesn't Exist"
(http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/goldsmith/if_it_doesnt_exist.html) or
"The Digital Flood: You'd Better Start Swimming or You'll Sink Like a Stone"
(http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/04/the-digital-flood-youdbetter-start-swimmin-or-youll-sink-like-a-stone/).
32212 Hauptseminar
Addicted to Plot: Genre Fiction After the Literary/Genre Divide (James
Dorson)
Zeit: Do 12:00-14:00 (Erster Termin: 21.04.2016)
Ort: 319 Seminarraum (Lansstr. 7 / 9)
The literary critic Edmund Wilson once described detective fiction as “a habitforming drug for which its addicts will fight like tigers.” Such has long been
the view of genre fiction as distinct from literary fiction. Being plot driven
instead of character or theme driven, genre fiction has often been dismissed
as the fast food of literature—cheap and tasty, but bad for you—and has long
ranked at the very bottom of literary hierarchies. However, with the recent
intrusion of high-status literary writers into the popular pleasures of genre
fiction, the distinction between the two has become tenuous. In this class, we
will take the new light shed on genre fiction from this most recent shaking up
of the highbrow/lowbrow divide as an opportunity to reread classics in two
major genres: mystery and science fiction. In reading prominent examples
from both genres, we will examine their mid-nineteenth-century rise as
distinctive popular forms, and trace the development of their conventions
over almost two centuries. We will analyze what makes their plots ‘addictive,’
and explore how genre organizes discourse and social knowledge. And we will
ask how the market and literary taste shape the expectations and
classification of genre. In the last part of the class, we will read two recent
examples of texts that break down the distinction between literary and genre
fiction, and ask how and to what effect they do so.
The reading material for the class includes stories and novels by Edgar Allan
Poe, Anna Katherine Green, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Dashiell Hammett, Chester
Himes, Philip K. Dick, Octavia Butler, Ursula LeGuin, Cormac McCarthy, and
Michael Chabon or Emily St. John Mandel (to be decided in class).
32213 Hauptseminar
Theory (After Theory?) (Mary Ann Snyder-Körber)
Zeit: Do 14:00-16:00 (Erster Termin: 21.04.2016)
Ort: 203 Seminarraum (Lansstr. 7 / 9)
Theories are a form of abstracting lens. They hone attention and sharpen
analytical vision. As Teresa de Lauretis has written:"What is called theory in
the humanities is nothing else than thinking about the world in which we live
and die, whereby theory ... involves not only thoughts that flow in a
temporal movement towards the future or the past, but also thoughts that
stop in their tracks and, in trying to figure out the enigma of the world at a
particular moment, assume something of an abstract, spatial shape" (Freud's
Drive 2008).
In this reading group-style course, we are going to to consider some of the
various shapes that theoretical work in the humanities has assumed since
2000. This period is marked by a backlash to the theory enthusiasms of the
1980s and 1990s. At the same time, humanistic inquiry is experiencing
increasing pressure to demonstrate its usefulness within an output-oriented
academy. The result is a push towards new "theory" in a moment of post- or
even anti-theoretical sentiment. Against this ambivalent backdrop, our
sessions will explore the distinctions between "paranoid" and "reparative"
readings, notions of the network, distant and surface reading models,
postrace paradigms, the return of phenomenology, new formalisms, and
potentials of an "emancipated" spectator.
Recommendations:
While much ink (literal and virtual) has been spilled in regards to the so-called
"death of theory," the collection Theory After "Theory" (2011) put together by
Jane Elliott and Derek Attridge is a good place to start informing yourself
about the "crises" and new constructions of thinking in the humanities.
Literature (C) – Textual Analysis
32214 Seminar
The Making of Americans: The Literary Imagination and the Working Hand
(Nathalia King)
Zeit: Mi 16:00-18:00 (Erster Termin: 20.04.2016)
Ort: 201 Seminarraum (Lansstr. 7 / 9)
32215 Hauptseminar
Post-Crisis Poetics (Sean Bonney)
Zeit: Do 14:00-16:00 (Erster Termin: 21.04.2016)
Ort: 319 Seminarraum (Lansstr. 7 / 9)
American authors have conceived of the writer’s work in ambivalent terms:
sometimes as drudgery for pay, sometimes as artisanal craft, and sometimes
as a sign of the intellect’s accession to a realm of freedom and truth. In 19th
and 20th century American literature, this ambivalence about the writer’s
place in society is manifest in the literary text as a range of attitudes that
moves from empathy with the working classes to alienation from their
condition. In the exploration of five stylistically dense and idiosyncratic texts,
the project of this course is to compare the material and social labor
performed by the characters to the imaginative, rhetorical work done by its
narrator(s).
The ongoing crises following the 2008 financial crash have had a profound
effect on questions relating to American avant-garde and experimental
poetics, just as they have on most other areas of public and private life. Since
the 1970s the primary focus of politically engaged radical poets, most
famously those associated with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement, had been
formal and syntactical questions, leading to a hermetic poetics that favoured
textual fetishism over social engagement, with the assumption that a radical
aesthetics always implied a radical political commitment. For a younger
generation such assumptions have begun to seem insufficient, if not
downright false: questions of content have gained more importance, and in
particular how to use that content without sacrificing the syntactical and
textual complexity that have always characterized avant-garde poetics.
Interdisciplinary Studies
32217 Oberseminar
Enlightenment Trajectories: Continuities and Ruptures (Christian Lammert,
Florian Sedlmeier)
Zeit: Do 18:00-19:00 (Erster Termin: 21.04.2016)
Ort: 319 Seminarraum (Lansstr. 7 / 9)
024eA7.1
In this interdisciplinary seminar we will read political philosophy and literary
writings from two different historical moments, around 1800 and the
contemporary, here broadly understood as the period after World War II onto
the present. In a first step, we will read some of the canonical authors of
European political philosophy and discuss how their ideas resonate with
political writers in the colonial Early Republic. In a second step, students will
explore the contemporary continuities and ruptures against the backdrop of
the end of historical colonialism, and unravel their transformations in the
wake of genocides, post- and neocolonial conditions, and the neoliberal
rationale. The seminar will examine if and to what extent American literary
texts might provide a privileged space for probing and reimagining these
legacies. Probing the trajectories of the Enlightenment means not the least to
discuss political and literary figures such as the immigrant, the refugee, or the
slave. Students will become acquainted with central concepts of political
philosophy, such as sovereignty and the social contract, but they will also
engage in an interdisciplinary exercise that seeks to assess the link between
politics and literature by confronting political philosophy with literary
imagination and vice versa.
For an active participation credit you will be asked to participate in an
expert/presentation group; requirements for a full graded Schein will be
announced in the first session.
32217L Lektürekurs
Enlightenment Trajectories: Continuities and Ruptures (Christian Lammert,
Florian Sedmeier)
Zeit: Do 19:00-20:00 (Erster Termin: 21.04.2016)
Ort: 319 Seminarraum (Lansstr. 7 / 9)

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